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Monday, April 18, 2011

While they poison the ocean

Someone's been playing games with the stock of Tokyo Electric, the outfit presiding over the worst nuclear disaster in history. Amidst all the other worries over the Fukushima meltdown site, now we can guess as to whether the timing of the bad news is being manipulated to make someone a bundle.

The sooner that company gets nationalized, the better.

Meanwhile, the radioactive water in the basement of reactor no. 4 -- the one with the damaged spent fuel pool and who knows what other problems -- is now five meters deep. That's 16.4 feet. And who knows how much is leaking into the ocean and groundwater from there. The environment won't be recovering from that in our lifetimes, that's for sure.

And the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo is now joining in with the insane happy talk. They've stopped handing out iodine tablets to Americans, because hey, they simply won't need them. Uh huh.

Let's see, 20 percent of the stock traded each day, that's 100 percent turnover in a week, and up to 10 percent of the stock traded in capitalist haven Hong Kong during the course of that week. With furious trading like that, shares are held for seconds, minutes or hours. While it is appropriate for regulators to investigate and be concerned, it is doubtful anyone buying in Hong Kong circumvented the 5 percent ownership reporting rule, or contrived an artifice to avoid reporting.

Whatever insider trading is going on (and I don't doubt that there is) it won't likely be at a level that triggers regulatory scrutiny. The fertile ground for insider investigations lies around the insiders themselves, and their family members and their business associates. I would love to see a regulatory strategy established that routinely assigns task forces to investigate situations where there are wide swings in stock prices unique to a particular company.